Aquaponics

Aquaponics Systems

With a Suburban Farmer aquaponics system you can easily grow edible fish species that can be harvested to supply your family with fresh fish, produced from your own backyard.

What Is Aquaponics?

Aquaponics combines ‘Aquaculure’ and ‘Hydroponics’ to grow edible fish and vegetables harvested from your own backyard.

So not only are you growing fresh edible fish, the filter used to clean the water grows fresh vegetables!

How Does It Work?

The water in a fish tank is high in nutrients and requires filtering. Instead of using a traditional filter, you pump the water into a specially built vegetable garden that feeds and waters your plants. In turn, the vegetable plants obtain the nutrients they need from the water, and return the filtered clean water to the fish tank.

Growing in this nutrient rich water your vegetables experience accelerated growth rates, are stronger and healthier and use about 10% of the water it takes to grow vegetable plants in soil.

With a tested simple design, our systems are simple to maintain, inexpensive to run and can fit in any sized backyard.

Fresh fish and a vegetable garden that you don’t need to water!

Attractive water features

Highly productive systems that look great!

Easy to upgrade

Easily increase the number of fish you can grow

Easy care

All you need to do is feed your fish and harvest your vegetables

Suits any backyard

Only require 3 x 3 metres of space

Everything supplied

No prior knowledge of fish farming required

Inexpensive to run

Low power and water requirements

Along with maintaining high levels of productivity, Suburban Farmer fish farm systems offer attractive designs that become the feature of your garden.

What We Do

We install quality aquaponics systems of various sizes capable of growing species such as barramundi, marron, trout, yabbies, black bream and silver perch. We can also retro- fit your existing water feature or pond by adding a water-wise vegetable garden filter (growbed).

With a tested simple design, our systems are easy to maintain, inexpensive to run and can fit in the corner of the patio or backyard. You only need 3 square metres in order to grow 25 fish and 30 – 50 vegetable plants.

Fish

Grow a range of species from Barramundi, Trout, Silver Perch, Marron, Yabbies and more

Grow 25 fish per vegetable garden filter, and you can increase the amount of fish in your tank by adding more vegetable filters (which means more vegetables too!)

Easy to look after and cheap to feed

Grow fish according to the seasons: Barramundi in summer, Trout in the winter

Vegetables

Grow better vegetables faster! Our fish farms use 10% of the water it takes to grow vegetable plants in the ground

Grow more vegetables! The plants only compete for light so you can plant more vegetables in a smaller area

The water in your fish farm is nutrient rich liquid gold! Keep a watering can near your fish farm and fill to water your fruit trees, favourite plants or vegetables planted in the ground. They will love you for it!

Aquaponics FAQs

There are a number of factors that influence how many fish you can keep in your tank. Tank size, filter capacity, water quality, fish species and feeding rates are factors that contribute to the amount of fish you can keep in your tank.

We aim to grow 25 fish per vegetable garden filter, and you can increase the amount of fish in your tank by adding more vegetable filters (which means more vegetables too!).

To get started there isn’t a lot you need to know about growing edible fish, in fact there isn’t a great difference between growing goldfish and growing edible fish, the principles are the same. Our systems come with all the tools needed to successfully rear fish to eating size without any prior knowledge of fish farming.

Your fish tank holds fish that are living in a confined environment and at much higher density than they are in nature. This increases the concentration of fish waste which has the potential to foul your water and affect the health of the fish.

In order to filter the water of these substances you need a system that removes excesses of waste and maintains optimum water quality for fish health. A growbed is a specially designed filter system, that uses naturally occurring friendly bacteria to convert fish wastes into a form of nutrient.

Vegetable plants are planted into the filter and the plants extract this nutrient from the water. No other filtration method is required in addition to the growbed.

You don’t need alot of area for a small system, only 2 square meters is enough room. Larger tanks are generally deeper rather than wider so even for a 3000litre tank you would only need a 3 – 4 square meter area.

You can go away for a week without organising someone to feed your fish – no problems at all. Even 2 weeks should be ok, however any longer than this you should organise someone to drop in and feed them.

Yes, and unless you have a rain water tank, you don’t have much choice. The tap water in Perth is pretty good and you really only need to ‘age’ tap water for about 24-72 hours to neutralise the chlorine in the water.

To age the water, you only need to fill your tank and give it 24-72 hours before introducing fish (depending on the amount of water and pump capacity). If you need to top up your water level at any stage, water straight from the tap is fine.

Frequent testing of your water is not necessary and you need only test the water if you notice a sudden change in activity i.e. Your fish have haven’t eaten for a couple of days when they were very good feeders, appear sluggish after previously being very active or start swimming and gulping at the surface of the water. Again, observation is the key and if your water looks dirty and starts to smell this would indicate that water conditions are not ideal.

Again, observation is the key and if your water looks dirty and starts to smell this would indicate that water conditions are not ideal.

Air pumps with automatic battery switchover are available with all fish farms. Also its worth noting that the pump in the fish farm only runs for a quarter of the day and as it is a low voltage pump, it’s very cheap to run.

The fish farms are self maintaining and very little needs to be done to keep them working at an optimum level. In fact as there are natural balances that keep the farms maintained the less you do the better!

The most you need to do is feed the fish, plant your vegetables and check once a month to make sure the drain outlet hasn’t been blocked by stray vegetable roots….very simple indeed!.

If you are growing fish for hobby purposes then no license is required.

Gallery

Photos of Suburban Farmer Aquaponics Systems

We would like to Suburban farmer for his time in answering all our questions we sincerely appreciate it. Am I allowed to say how excited I am over getting the chickens? Well the secret is out lolol Thanks so much.

Karen, Fremantle

Suburban Farmer provides friendly and efficient service, just one phone call and we had our chicken pen setup with chickens. He also delivers the feed for our chickens.

Rebecca, Kinross

Suburban Farmer installed our aquaponics and we are very happy with it. We now have trout and marron in our backyard, something we would not have thought was possible. All the best.

Ray and Maureen, Rockingham

I wanted to write in to say that we are so happy with the chicken house and chickens. I thought that maybe the kids would tire of looking after the chooks but I have no shortage of helpers and the other day my neighbours child knocked on the door to ask if he could help collect the eggs! Love it!

Jane, Como

Thank -you so much. Like Mr Bell saying that he could foresee a day when every city has a telephone I dont think you should underestimate the importance of this! I believe your work could make a great deal of difference to many many lives. Very excited about the new fish farm and the chooks are going great as always.

David, Greenwood

We are very happy with the fish farm system which Suburban Farmer supplied and installed for us. They installed the system exactly to our requirements, and was happy to spend as much time as was required to answer all the questions we had about the operation and maintenance of the system. Highly recommended!

Adam, Joondalup

The veggie garden is brilliant!! Dad is the type of person who would have done it himself despite the obvious limitations. Suburban Farmers quick response saved us from having to tie dad up to stop him!!